I’ve been wanting to talk to God about sex, but I’ve been afraid to get in too deep all at once. So to break the ice, I just asked what was up with the missionary position. God told me it was one of the many things that got messed up in the translation.

See, somewhere along the line she told some holy man that people were on a higher plane than the other animals when it came to sex. Since animals will pretty much copulate whenever and wherever the mood strikes, the priests decided that the way to show we were on a higher plane was to restrict sex as much as possible. They probably would have outlawed it completely, but they couldn’t, because they still had to honor the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. So instead they came up with a single approved position and then only allowed that in very limited circumstances.

God says they got it all wrong, but for understandable reasons. In addition to trying to stand out from the other animals, they were also trying to deal with a couple of other issues. The first was the jealous desire to guarantee knowledge of who was the father of any children. The second was the danger of venereal disease at a time when science wasn’t ready to offer much help.

The reality, she told me, is that the way we are separated from the other animals is by bringing our intelligence into our sex acts. Animals do it by instinct. We do it for love and recreation. If she had really wanted us to have such a limited repertoire, she told me, she wouldn’t have made us fit together in so many ways that feel so good.